What do teachers need?

I believe there has been a fundamental change in some parents. My parents’ generation fully expected the school to do what they could, given large classes, etc. They did not expect individualized teaching and programs. sorry, they just did not in the 1960’s. Today a large number of parents expect the school to provide far more with no more resources. We do not have the staff to provide the intensive programs the most aggressive parents are asking for. I need at least one more aide and/or a counterpart to split the grade levels with. I am expected to handle all exceptionalities at K-6, singlehandedly with one 5 hour aide. I cannot provide the level of “therapy” some parents demand. I can help, a good bit, but I cannot fix LD with the number and more importantly the range of ages and needs that are represented on my caseload, every single day. I am stretched and pulled in too many directions and find that I must prioritize my time and my resources to handle the most needy areas, often leaving less obviously needy issues untouched.

I need a smaller, less diverse caseload. I need more teachers and aides to meet my students’ needs.

Thanks for asking and for “listening.”

Your welcome Anyita and Thanks….. I expected as much.
Given todays economy……I bet the schools have a lot more money at their expense than they did in the 60s? Just a thought… and depending on income ranges.
What are the ratios in your classes?I have been told that the guidelines are 12 special needs students to one teacher in my state.If they are diverse students, do you feel that this is too much? Is it the state guidlines that need changed?
Do you feel that there is money to be used for special education…but it ends up going somewhere else? I have been told that the new idea guidelines will allow the LEA to use the funds wherever they choose. Do you think this will create a problem?
Do you know what information is accessible to the parents as far as how the schools spend their money?
Do you think there are grants that could be applied for and are not?
I apologize for all of the questions…any answers would be appreciated.
MO

It is fun to discuss. We are in a recession and our state, CA, is being hit pretty hard. The last recession resulted in severe cuts in education budgets. We are just at the start of this one, it takes a year or two for a recession to be felt at the state level since last year’s taxes fund this year’s programs. I do know that governor has asked many (if not all) state agencies to submit budgets that are 20% less for next year. We’ll see how this looks for public schools.

Last night my sister, also a teacher, and I were discussing ADHD youngsters and the perpetual problems of keeping them organized. This is the most difficult thing for me. I am in my resource room and the problems exist in the general ed. classroom. There is one of me and my students are usually spread across 17 classrooms. My sister pointed out how annoying it is to stop teaching and get children organized. She really hates to lose teaching minutes. She also pointed out that for these few children she has each year, parents do not seem to hold up their end of the bargain at home, inspecting backpack and binder, supervising the organizing, making sure papers are put where they belong. This is an area I never feel competent with and we do have to write organizational goals and objectives for these youngsters, but there is no one to work with them. I would like to see a small cadre of roving aides, depending on school size, dispatched to cover the school daily on a schedule, to visit each highly disorganized child and coach them in straightening up their desks and materials. Two aides could easily do this and help a little here and there. The trick would be to get people who would require the child to do the work while they coached and not enable the child to the point that they child remains dependent. Teachers who are teaching a mile a minute rarely have the time to stand back and correctly supervise this, so they do end up enabling.

I’d like to keep most of my students for 90 minutes of language arts to fully cover all skills. I think one additional resource teacher to take half of the grade levels would enable me to do this effectively. I think I could create a really good program and have the time to teach it all w/o having to pick and choose, not getting adequately to all skill areas.

Anitya,

Since you are an expirenced teacher I would like to ask you something. Is it possible that everyone is expecting too much too soon from kids these days thus, creating so many kids needing special help.

I remember going to my son’s kindergarten open house and hearing how he would learn computers and all this neat new stuff. I just kept thinking he just turned 5 he’s my baby can’t he play awhile more.

Personally I do think if they spent more time in early years reading maybe there wouldn’t be so many problems.

Although I am not Anitya and just another parent I do agree with you that things keep getting pushed further and further down. When are they allowed to be kids? I thought kids learned from play? I thought they needed this 1st in order to learn?

Anita,

It really makes me sad to hear the conditions that teachers have to work under in other parts of the country, as well as what that translates to in terms of meeting the needs of children.

Most of what you ask for is standard operating procedure in our schools. Even then, whether a child has a good year or a bad year is highly dependent on the skills of the particular teaching team they are assigned to. We’ve had mostly pretty good to excellent teachers, and this includes reg. ed. teachers and SPED staff. For the first half of last year, we had an awesome SPED teacher, a good LA teacher, and a very poor math/science/social studies teacher. No amount of support from the SPED teacher and classroom aide (and both were assigned ONLY to that integrated 5th grade class, so had no additional caseload) was enough to make up for that poor classroom teacher.

Because things were so bad, we ended up moving him mid-year to a class with less SPED support (1/2 day aide, 1/2 day SPED teacher) but one good and one excellent reg. ed teacher. Even though he was getting half the amount of in-class academic support written into his IEP (and which wasn’t “enough” in the other class) he thrived in this environment. In each classroom he’s been in, either the SPED teacher or an aide checked that he had the materials he needed and that he had his homework assignments written down properly.

The SPED teacher he had in the first class was super organized, and kept the entire class (SPED kids and otherwise) organized

But nowhere in our system do SPED teachers have the case loads you have to deal with. My son is heading into 6th grade this year, and the way they do it here at the middle school level, there are “teaching teams” of 3 reg. ed teachers to a group of about 70 children split into 3 classes. Robbie’s integrated team has a SPED teacher as part of the teaching team. There is another integrated team as well, and then 2 non-integrated teams. I don’t know how many kids on IEP’s are serviced on a team, but I know my son’s resource room time is scheduled for the “music” and “art” periods, and his IEP calls for most of his academic support to be in the reg. ed classroom. So I am assuming that it will be like last year, that the SPED teacher travels with this group of kids throughout the academic periods of the day. I also know there are aids, though I don’t know where or how they are used yet.

So it seems to me, that in our school system, a good teacher has the support s/he needs to do the job right.

That sounds like a pretty good set-up. Our junior high is similar. We have “cores” that include 4 core subject teachers and about 175 students. Most of the time all resource students are placed in the same core. There are 3 cores per grade level. The resource teacher and her aide work with that core and spend a good portion of the day in classes. The model is strong on in class support and weak on remediation. We have one 7th grade resource teacher and one in 8th. For the last few years there has been an additional half-time teacher.

For elementary I really like my program to be remediation-oriented. When I can get students early enough I can teach them for years and they do learn to read, though some never become very fast and remain more labored than typical grade level readers; but they can do it and that beats the dickens out of going to 7th grade virtually unable to read.

My caseload is not that horrifically large these past two years. There is supposed to be a cap at 28, though the districts typically violate this, mine included. My caseload has been in the mid 20s. I find that sheer numbers of students are a factor in making the caseload difficult to manage, while another is diversity. I am coming to believe that diversity of age and need probably is the more challenging piece.

I could not agree with you more. Not everyone will. LD is LD and age won’t change it much. But, we have literally pushed what was first grade curriculum in the 1950-1970 (give or take) down to K and we still are pushing more down. My district gives a district writing test each spring to all students. Last year we administered it, for the first time, to K.

There are other countries that start formal academic instruction later and their students do fine. When I was in college I read a study where the researcher took an experimental group and gave them an interesting cognitively rich curriculum in first and second grade. No reading, just lots of hands-on, listening, etc. Lots of concept building. In third grade that group was started on reading instruction. By the end of third grade they equalled the control group of students who had been subjected to routine reading instruction in first and second grade. I might wager that the experimental group outperformed the control group in many other untested areas and possibly for years, given a good foundation in thinking skills.

We certainly could delay reading instruction and spend the first two years in lots activities that included phonemic awareness and word play. We could make certain all children could segment and blend and we could build speaking/listening vocabulary and listening skills. Comprehension could be directly addressed via listening. But, in America we seem to think earlier is better. I am ready for 4 year olds to be in school learning to read and taking standardized tests.

I’ve been appalled recently to hear radio advertisements for a reading program touted to have your kids reading in PRESCHOOL! These poor little kids! I suspect that the kids who learn to read with such a program wouldn’t have any trouble learning to read on a more typical schedule. For those with a real problem, it sounds like a great way to get them frustrated and turned off even earlier.

Karen

At the elementary school level, our school system does pull-out when needed. My son didn’t need it for academic work in lower elementary school… as an NLD kid his reading (at least decoding and concrete comprehension) have always been quite advanced. Because of the strong emphasis on literacy in the lowere elementary, my son’t areas of deficit were not really taxed. He was pulled out for OT, and got an adequate amount of academic support in the classroom to help him with his organizational and attention issues. These are things that really need to be worked on in little bits all through the school year.

But I know they do a lot of pull-outs, including for kids that are not classified as LD, if they think they need it. My younger one was not identified with any learning disability, but by mid-first grade was not reading the way his teacher thought he should be. She referred him for testing by the reading specialist, who decided that he would benefit from a pull-out reading group. He was pulled out for reading for 40 minutes 5 days a week for 2 years. The neuropsychologist who saw him this summer (other issues, long story) said that the school had done an excellent job remediating his decoding problems. She said that his profile would suggest a child who would have problems with decoding, but at this point he tests like a kid with “remediated dyslexia”.

The school has a number of “reading specialists” who work with the kids who need it in small groups. Then they have SPED teachers who work in the inclusion classrooms, and they also have a couple of self contained classrooms for kids who just can’t make effective progress in the general ed classroom. So there really is a good range of alternatives depending on the child’s needs.

Karen

“More haste, less speed” is an old British proverb; the meaning is that if you hurry and hurry you will make mistakes, do a bad job, take wrong turns, and so on; then you will have to redo and repair and turn back — and in the long run you’ll be a lot slower than someone who did things carefully the first time. And your work will be patched and uneven and never up to the level of something done properly from the beginning.

This is a perfect description of the standard American curriculum. It’s bad in reading and a disaster in math. The test scores are out for all to see — over thirty years, math scores have stabilized and even risen a little in Grade 4, are about the same in Grade 8, and continue to be rock-bottom in Grade 12. In a *US* study and test, US senior students score consistently in the bottom third of industrialized nations, despite spending *more* class time, doing *more* homework, and of course spending far more money. So please tell me what is the huge advantage of teaching kids to multiply in kindergarten when they are still failing basic algebra in Grade 12? And of course exactly the same thing can be said about reading.

Scandinavian countries send kids to play-oriented daycare and kindergartens until they are seven, and then start a rigorous *but not hurried* academic curriculum.They just take time and teach things until they are learned (what a radical concept!) By Grade 10 or 11 they are doing calculus, a course that in North America is college material (or at most Grade 12 AP) for those very, very few students who don’t drop math. Similarly they teach reading at age seven — but they TEACH *reading*, they don’t play a weird guessing game. Children in elementary school there are expected to read children’s books and write sentences and paragraphs. And then when they get to high school they are *ready* for literature and essays.

I read an interesting article once that pointed out that the intellectual expectations of elementary textbooks are often greater than those of high-school texts. The elementary books ask kids to reason and to create; the high-school texts ask only for copying and imitation. Of course, if the kids are unable to reach the level asked by the earlier books and wander around lost, then they will of course need remediation of the basic skills later. Wouldn’t it make so much more sense to teach the basics first and save the dessert for later?

This is a systemic problem — everybody is trying to keep up with the Joneses. The kids in the next county “read” (ie memorize) a pre-primer in kindergarten, so we have to memorize through two pre-primers and write a novel. They do statistics in Grade 2, so we have to do it in Grade 1. This is made worse by standardized tests that try to cover every subject under the sun, so schools feel it’s their duty to keep scores high by teaching every subject under the sun, as early as possible, and to repeat it every year. Development of any real skills or intellectual depth gets lost in the shuffle.

This is an issue that has to be fought at least at the level of the school board and often the state or province.Maybe after some of the parents here have educated themselves and gotten their own kids through school, they can go on to the legislature.

By the way I do think it’s possible and even not too difficult to teach kids to read at age 5 — I’ve done it myself, and they’ve been doing it in England for over a century, at least those schools that didn’t adopt misguided “whole-language” programs. First you have to teach reading rather than guessing, and second you have to have a program that is appropriate for five-year-olds. Done right, this gives kids the chance to read children’s books and stories to themselves and to take time to develop comprehension and writing skills at a reasonable pace. Done wrong, it’s another way of stressing them into nervous breakdowns. The issue is not so much teaching at an early age, but what you teach and what you expect of the child.
And in math, there is a degree of mental maturity absolutely required and you can’t get past that. A lot of schools *fake* past it, but they are found out in high school when the “advanced” skills melt away like snow in June.